“It’s when water is touching a surface” blah blah I can easily disprove it by doing this or that. There is a surface of water in a bucket, does that become wet when I pour more water? Then you have to say “solid surfaces,” but furthermore am I “wet” if I enter a body of water fully submerged? No, I’m “under water” and saying I’m wet would be weird. Is the bottom of a bucket “wet” or does it contain water? How much water can something have on it for it to be “wet” or “submerged”? For most of history language has been arbitrary and man-made. All of these cases are caught by our arbitrary rules when we encounter them. By arguing water is wet or not without mentioning anthropic usage would make you wrong on the grounds of your argument.
Saying you’re wet while underwater is the most natural thing, what?
I find it patently absurd to say water isn’t wet. Like obvious doublespeak levels of absurd. It’s the wettest thing possible.
If I put a tungsten cube under water I wouldn’t really call it wet. But if I sprayed it with water I would. But that changes when it’s a person, no? The type of surface it is depends as well, not all surfaces are equal - like something that is water phobic (aerogel) can make something not wet even though it (person + aerogel) is in contact with water. I’m not arguing water isn’t wet. I absolutely think it is by our language. But I am saying there isn’t a good way of arriving at that conclusion by going full Webster Dictionary.
I would call anything under water wet with the specific exception of stuff like aerogel that is hydrophobic, because it’s insulated by a layer of air. I think at enough pressure that would be overcome and the material would become wet.
The only thing wetter than water would be your mom I suppose.
Simply superior
unless theres more than one molecule of water, its touching itself
If that’s true then holy water is a lie
You can only have one molecule of holy water in a container at a time
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Burnt by water, ouch!
Lake Superior used Scald!
The irony of this statement—for any one who’s ever been in Lake Superior—is immense.
Critical hit! It’s super effective!
A single molecule of water is not wet but as soon as more then one molecule is present the water is then wet. That is my hill to die on in this argument.
I disagree. Mixing water and another liquid does not make the second liquid “wet” - it makes a mixture. Then if you apply that mixture to a solid the solid becomes wet until the liquid leaves through various processes and becomes dry. If that process is evaporation, the air does not become wet it becomes humid.
Water (and other liquids) make solid things wet.
If you put water and oil in a container and they separate, the interface between them is not wet.
Humid air can make things wet, but that only happens when the moisture in the air condenses onto a solid surface. Humid air will not make the surface of a lake wet even though water is condensing out of the air onto that surface.
is a cloud wet?
a cloud is (basically not exactly) “steam” - steam makes things wet when it condenses into water
(clouds of water on Earth at least, not Venusian clouds of Sulphur for eg)
The word you might be looking for is vapor.
Clouds are water vapor.
yes but I didn’t want to get dragged into whether vapor was wet.
It’s not solid, so no. It’s humid.
does that also classify as moist?
Yes, moist can mean humid.
I mean. The molecule itself isn’t a solid or liquid, that has to do with the behavior of the molecules in dimensional space. Your argument is based on water as a substance, not as a molecule, completely avoiding the basis of their argument.
Besides that, most liquids you could easily mix with water are themselves water-based and therefore would be totally dried up into a powder or perhaps a jelly without their water content. To add water is to make them wet, and then they exist as a wet incorporated substance. As liquid substances. In fact, they could not dry up if they were not wet in the first place; to become dry is to transition away from the state of being wet.
You know what else dries up? Water.
Those things are mostly true yes but we’re talking about the function of the adjective wet in language and the phenomenon of wetness as a linguistical descriptor and livable experience. Obviously things are wet, it’s an incredibly common and useful term, but it probably does elude rigid classification and all you’re going to get are opinions because there’s no way to rigidly define it. It’s a “heap problem” there isn’t a specific point where something becomes a heap, but yet you can heap thing.
You sure bailed from your entire argument pretty darn quickly to now argue “there’s no way to rigidly define it.” There is. It’s “wet.” It behaves in the way wet things do. There’s no reason to say otherwise than to be contrarian. The only way to argue otherwise is to create a strict definition of wetness, as you just have, which ultimately fails when put up against reality and a more human use of language.
“Wet”, like “funny”, “beautiful”, “delicious”, “bright”, “hot”, “spicy”, "soft’, “hairy”, “clean”, “malleable” are subjective, context specific, descriptors. You can’t describe how many hairs makes something hairy: three hairs on a bowl of ice cream is hairy, but the opposite on a human head.
I’m confused, how does any of this help me determine whether that dude is a skilled lover or not?
sadly my wife isn’t on lemmy so we will never know
Your argument is based on water as a substance, not as a molecule
Water cant be just a molecule, as the relationship between molecules of a substance at different temperatures is what makes something a solid, liquid, gas, or plasma. Water is the liquid state of H2O, and thus one molecule of that would just be a single H2O
You know what else dries up? Water.
That’s just the H2O changing phase to gaseous, it doesn’t stop existing. I’d personally classify humidity as “wet”, as would most people I’ve met, so it’s still wet after “drying”
I’d say wet and dry are relative terms here but ultimately, yes, you and I are in agreement that water is wet.
Wetting is an actual physical process that occurs between a liquid and a solid, or two unmixable liquids:
If there is two molecules of water which one is the dry molecule and which one is the wet molecule?
If there are three molecules does one get divided in half to make the other two wet or does only one get wet and one stays dry until a fourth arrives?
If there are*
And they both get wet, since they’re both touching other water molecules. As goes for any other number above one. All of this is very obvious.
Thank you for this. I need more people to be on board with this explanation.
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A single drop has over 1.5 sextillion molecules (21 zeroes), so yeh even a single drop is wet, debates over cuz allow it.
If everything water touches is wet, and water touches itself, then water is wet.
Water isn’t you lmao gottem
wetting is the process of a liquid adhering to a surface. water by definition can’t be wet
Solid (frozen) water, commonly referred to as “ice,” can have a surface.
is ice wet?
By your bizarre definition, yes.
That’s the actual definition. That’s why bad solder joints are called dry joints and melting the solder across a soldering iron tip is called wetting the tip.
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Another note (which you mentioning air made me think of), if water “has no surface” then how does it have “surface tension?” Another point for “water touches water.”
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“Wet” Is used as an adjective describing something that consists of or is touching some liquid. Nobody seems to have a problem with the concept of wet paint. I can’t imagine anyone other than Sheldon Cooper saying “technically the wall is wet, the paint is liquid!” If you would say that, I have a locker to shove you in
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It’s not “less than meaningful” if you understand wet as a relative term. There can be a normal level of wetness where if it is exceeded we then call that thing wet, and if it’s under that threshold we call it dry relative to the norm.
If you somehow came from a perfectly dry environment, yeah, you would probably consider our world pretty wet. You would have a pretty hard time describing your experience to others if you couldn’t use the word wet to do so. The word doesn’t lose meaning just because you go all reductio ad adsurdum with it.
It can be, but the ice itself is not wet.
Liquids don’t have surfaces?
The property of cohesion means that water is touching and adhering to the surface of other water molecules.
It doesn’t change Tom Fitton being a shit, but facts do matter.
Then literally everything is wet, because the air contains water molecules! But we don’t say everything is wet, just like water molecules touching water molecules don’t make each other wet.
I mean I’d say that counts as wet.
So literally everything on the surface of the planet, in every building, in every room, is wet? That makes it a completely useless definition and is obviously not what anyone means when they’re talking about something being “wet”.
It’s not useless if you understand wet as a relative term. There can be a normal level of wetness where if it is exceeded we then call that thing wet, and if it’s under that threshold we call it dry relative to the norm.
If air with 0% humidity can be called dry, then air with humidity can be called wet.
Language isn’t perfect and it’s often contextual. If someone wants to describe a property of water based on a newer usage in physics, maybe choose a newer word.
If air with 0% humidity can be called dry, then air with humidity can be called wet.
Yet we don’t do this, we call it humid.
The water in the air is not liquid water. Unless it’s raining, in which case it’s very much liquid water, and you’re very wet if you’re standing in it
Yes, the water in the air is not liquid water, just like individual water molecules are not liquid water. You got it!
An individual water molecule is not liquid, but if it’s touching other water molecules that are in a liquid state, then it is wet.
Water molecules can’t be in a liquid state, it’s only the aggregate that’s liquid. Therefore water molecules can’t be wet.
What is humidity other than the measurement of how saturated the air is with water vapor (or how wet the air is)
Except for the fact that water by definition is wet
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wet
Fun fact: there is no such thing as a universally accepted definition. Words mean what we mean when we say them. And the vast majority of people use “wet” to describe something that is made up of, touching, or covered in a liquid, especially water. The arbitrary assertion that the definition somehow only applies to solids is just facile contrarianism with no actual basis in linguistics.
yeah but you know what the vast majority of people are like
But that’s not the definition of wet. Wet is something having liquid adhere to it, usually water. It’s a gained quality. Water doesn’t adhere to itself, it can’t gain the quality of being wet because it is the thing that gives that quality. It’s like saying that fire is burnt. It does the burning.
Water is cohesive which means yes, it does attach to itself. It’s one of the main reasons capillary action works and your blood flows the way it does.
obviously not a lot of blood flow going on in this thread
wet
1 of 3
adjective
ˈwet
wetter; wettest
Synonyms of wet
1
a
: consisting of, containing, covered with, or soaked with liquid (such as water)Water definitely consists of water my man
Maybe by your definition, but have you considered that the definitions that I like are the objectively correct ones?
/s shouldn’t be necessary but this is the internet
Honestly, without the /s I would have assumed idiocy over sarcasm. I hate that I would usually be right in doing so.
Water literally adheres to itself. That’s one of its most important qualities.
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Since heat is thermal energy, it can transfer this thermal energy but it loses some due to the second law of thermodynamics. Water doesn’t lose the ability to adhere to other things when it transfers, so the two phenomenon are not really equateable.
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Fair enough, heat can’t lose heat. However when it interacts with a substance some of the energy is “lost” in that it transfers to the substance. Unless it is a completely inert material.
Can you hold a unit of heat? Or do you hold a substance that is imbued with heat energy? Seems like a good reason to say the two are not equateable, which was the main point.
Other than that, a specific fields definition of wet does not make the term exclusive to that field. In aquatic science, wet still means something that water is adhering to. Water adheres to itself so water is wet.
Heat is indeed hot.
Actually fire is the byproduct of a chemical reaction. The material being combusted is the one doing the burning. Fire (rather, extreme heat) can cause combustion in other materials, given an oxygen rich environment, but the fire is not itself doing the combustion or burning.
Wetness is not a chemical reaction, so it’s kind of an apples to oranges comparison.
You can’t wet a lake
Because it’s already wet
Savage lake
Driving east from Thunder Bay, once you hit Wawa, ON and head south you’re right on the shoreline for a bit, and it’s fucking amazing.
First time I drove that I just wanted to pull over and take some pics but there’s nowhere to stop.
“Lake Savage” hits harder in my opinion
Just wait till lakes home pull up…
Man this has the comments at each other’s throats.
Water is wet though.
it’s moist at most
Nope. Baba is wet though.
I’d still argue water molecules touching eachother make themselves wet, but that guy is an ass so fuck him.
actually water molecules are cohesive (attracted to each other, yes in that sense you are right) but wetness is associated with adhesion which basically means the possibility of a liquid to adhere to a solid surface so no, water molecule themselves alone are not enough to fit into the definition of wetness i hope i wasnt too technical but i tried to be as dummy as possible
This issue people have with some fixed phrases is bizarre to me.
Might as well say “Actually, this ‘morning’ isn’t ‘good’ at all!” and pretend you have a point. Really devalues anything following it by revealing the person saying it to be an obnoxious pedant.
But standing up for women’s rights this way get’s more retweets, which is the ultimate measure of success after all, so what do I know?
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Responding like this means you don‘t understand the phrase „good morning“. It means „I wish you a good morning“.
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Damn, for a lake bragging about making things wet that was some sick burn.
water isnt wet bro it just makes everything it touches wet but i SWEAR its not wet bro pls just believe me i have to be right its not wet
This but unironically
It’s such a weird thing to say that it’s dry.
Why can’t it be neither? Being wet or dry is a property of solids, or maybe gasses (where you’d say “humid” rather than “wet”). It doesn’t make sense as a qualifier of water itself.
It can be neither, I said it’s weird when people say it’s dry.
I never got it either. I think they’re just contrarians. They just want to feel like they discovered something novel that all the people before them got wrong so they can indulge in pedantic arguments about it.
That is, when it’s not engagement baiting like the tweet above.
Possibly. Some do, I’m sure.
I see a lot of people try to answer brainteaser questions like this as if they can be driven down to some scientific ultimatum, but science can’t answer questions of philosophy. “Wet” is something we made up. A towel doesn’t care if it’s “damp” or not. How could it?
See my other comment if you want a link to a fun Vsauce video.
This is physically correct
